On 11/18/2021 5:36 PM, Gérard Milmeister via ntg-context wrote:
Using old fonts
Around 2000 I acquired a collection of fonts, mostly Type 1
and some TrueType. As it appears they are not fully usable
in ConTeXt. The two main issues are:
1. Kerning and ligatures
These features can be only be used, if the GPOS and GSUB
tables are present and adequately filled. Now, the old font
files do not have these tables, but instead use some
obsolete (?) form of kerning table, and ligatures are not
qualified as such, but only trough their Unicode point and
name (most commonly fi and fl). I used fontforge, which
creates the GPOS table automatically, added the liga table
manually, and generated an OTF font file.
Is there a way to automate this (possibly a fontforge
script)? The script should also find the ligatures (there
may also be frac substitutions). Or is there another way
which leaves the files unchanged?
Are you talking type 1 fonts? These should just work, assuming that you
have the afm files installed. You need to define them with the right
features enabled (just like opentype fonts).
2. Selecting glyphs from multiple font files
Often there are additional font files which contain small
caps (in place of lowercase characters) and old style
figures (in place of digits), and other variant glyphs and
additional ligatures (usually the font name contains OsF,
SC, Alt, or Exp). Sometimes these are not allocated to a
Unicode point, but only identified by name (e.g.
"threeoldstyle" or "Esmall"). Is it possible to create some
sort of virtual feature (such as onum), that will cause
ConTeXt to take glyphs from another file (but only for
specified Unicode ranges)? I suppose this can be done with a
Lua goody.
The fallback mechanism does that (you can define a collection that way).
One can also try to make features (there are examples in the te st suite).
Hans
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